Up the railroad came an army of engineers with Keith high among them to stretch a dam at the very edge of Kensico, trapping the Bronx and its cousin the Byram stream. With the engineers came the laborers, a horde of Italians and all the muck and vermin that had marked the building of the Croton dam. The Kensico dam would impound only sixteen hundred and twenty million gallons and there were sixteen hundred thousand people in New York by the time it was finished. The two Rye ponds dammed and a Byram reservoir completed and the Gun Hill reservoir at Williamsbridge raised the total to three and a half billion gallons, but RoBards saw that nothing could check the inevitable command to build a higher parapet at Kensico and spread a tributary lake across his farm and his tulip trees, his home, and his graves. Meanwhile, as the townspeople inundated the country all about, the greater tides of the republic overflowed all the continent. When Immy had married Chalender, she had had to sail around the peak of South America to San Francisco. But now the lands between were filled with cities, and the farmers were pushing out to retrieve the deserts from sterility. Railroads were shuttling from ocean to ocean and it took hardly more days now than months then for letters and people to go and come. Letters from Immy had not been many nor expressed much joy in the romance of the Pacific colonists. The return of Chalender to San Francisco seemed rather to cause a recrudescence of unhappiness. After Patty’s death a letter came, addressed to her, that RoBards opened as her earthly proxy and read with tangled feelings: “My husband is what he always was, a flirt incorrigible, a rake for all his loss of teeth. He still kisses the old ladies’ hands and gives them a charitable thrill. And he kisses all the young girls’ lips that he can reach. “But I can’t complain. I was shopworn when he took me from the shelf. I am so domestic that I can hardly believe my own eventless diary. I am plain and plump and my husband, such as he is, brings home so many stories that I don’t miss the novels much. “The neighbors run in with scandals, but I can usually say that Harry told me first. He is a beast but a lot of fun. For the children’s sake, I endure. I grow very homesick, though, and cry myself to sleep after my children have cried themselves to sleep. But oh, to have you tuck me in again, my pretty, my darling Mamma, and oh, to look into Papa’s sad, sweet eyes, and the unwavering love that seemed to grow the greater as I deserved it less and less!” Finishing the letter RoBards was glad, for some reason, that Patty had never seen it. She might have hated Chalender for being so fickle, but RoBards had heard him cry out in his loneliness and he could never hate him any more. He could not have sent him to hell or kept him there if he had been God, even the jealous God of Genesis. Yet if Chalender were not to go to hell, who could be sent?